


the perfected i

by transversely



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2018-01-07 10:59:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wakes up with an ache in his neck from the floor of the security tower and a odd, peaceful certainty that his decision has been made for him: was always made from the moment he understood on graduation night, and again at Castle Utgard, and again facing Armin Arlelt from between Reiner’s disintegrating fingers, that a compass face is only an accident of function away from a clock’s, and somehow with the winding down of time he has become all that’s left of their magnetic north.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the perfected i

**Author's Note:**

> A belated Bad Bildungsroman for Bertolt's birthday--happy birthday, colossal mess! 
> 
> This work contains manga spoilers up to chapter 51, canon-typical violence, mentioned Bertolt-->Annie, sexuality, and narration from an occasionally unsympathetic main character, as expected of the shifters. 
> 
> Many thanks to terminal enablers tumblr user khepria, who listened to me lose my mind over this literally endlessly, and tumblr user kanou-shuugo, who is responsible for dragging me bodily into Reibert hell in the first place.
> 
> "The perfected I" is a phrase nicked from Rumi.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

  

 

He supposes Reiner and Annie might be surprised to learn that sunlight photosynthesis is varied too, just like they believe human food is. An overcast day will get you bad-tempered and irritable because the sunlight tastes dirty, and that’s as it should be—it’s dissatisfying to scrape what you need from the undersides of clouds and trees, and your skin can sense the dishonesty. Moonlight is a more difficult proposition and can leave you maudlin because of how your body aches as it strains towards the secondhand light, all that taut, pained hunger that won’t let you rest under the drip until you’ve had enough. Sunlight fractured by raindrops is bitter to the taste but rewarding. You can hold your hand up where the skin is thinnest, and under the nail or near a pulse point you can see your blood lit by rainbows.  

Reiner hasn’t used solely sunlight since he and Bertolt used to do it as an exercise in the days before leaving, and then for the sake of practice they had purposely chosen days with no cloud cover at all. They’d used the concentric rings of granite formations with plateau tops where, as rumor or at least Berik had it, Annie’s father had first met the future Mrs. Leonhardt, asleep on the top of one with the tips of her hair going slowly to glass and then to crystal under the riotous, near indecent profusion of sunlight. He supposes that—on a technicality—Reiner was good at it. Eating in human form it could take him ten or twelve minutes to finish a meal, but when he used sunlight it only took one languid stretch, arm-to-arm like a wingspan:  buoyant, exuberant, wholly entitled; fingertips pressed to Bertolt’s own forearm in a blade grip, unable to take something good for himself without trying to ensure its value was transitive, or maybe it had always been the reverse.

“You make yourself too small, that’s the thing,” he’d gloated, “spread out a little—“ but that, Bertolt could have told him even then, is hardly advice for overcast skies. That’s the sort of the thing a person would say if he only ever expected to be in full sunlight. That’s the sort of thing a person would say if he hadn’t yet thought of a time when there wouldn’t be any sunlight at all.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

“Probably brings back memories, huh,” says Ymir, “whaddaya say.” 

He looks over the edge of the wall. He’s taller now by about two and a half handspans (three of Reiner’s, five of Annie’s) and it occurs to him that if he’d thought of it at all during training, he’d half expected the wall to increase proportionately, but it hasn’t. There’s moonlight everywhere and everywhere and everywhere: molten milk out on the hollow buildings so the wind, when it comes back up to them, seems gilded, pure and threaded with whistling notes, the aura of something blown through a silver flute. 

“Not really,” he says, “I was very young.” 

“Well, what kind of bully are you, you don’t _remember_ that time you kicked in Shiganshina’s teeth on the playground?”

He shrugs. She makes a disgusted noise and in spite of or perhaps because of this slings an arm around his shoulders and propels him along the wall. The swaying way she walks makes the moon weave in his vision, a drunken trajectory he knows it doesn’t have but then, he’s never been drunk anyway. It’s only common sense.

“You’re not sweating a lot today, kid,” Ymir says. “Or what is it, you forgot your winter-weight cardigans? Isn’t there some saying here about the _womanly presence_ , I guess I’m like, a civilizing influence on you losers, or. Whatever.”

She says _here_ with such a complete lack of emphasis it rings like a hanging bell; he knows she doesn’t mean Shiganshina. Her voice is weighted with curiosity as though she wants to test it: talking to someone else about _here_ , for the first time sharing a presupposed knowledge of a _there_.

He waits for sympathy but it doesn’t come. Waiting for it isn’t a damaging sensation or one that mandates anything on his part. It’s like mild, midday hunger, and therefore a comforting one, his child self in the mess hall on festival days, watching them put out treats: a heavy slice of bread smothered in nutmeg and milk, golden plump pound cakes, pickles sluiced with brine with the taste of summer sun still spicy in the meat, and all of it sensation associated with indulgence and not sustenance. For the first time then he’d embraced the idea of an existence at total remove. Forced alienation from these people, who would never forgive him, but from Annie and Reiner now, too—was it so bad, to be lonely, by choice or by design? It was like a greater height: what rose so quickly must surely rise to be closer to the sun. 

Is that what it felt like, he thinks of saying to Ymir now. That hunger. Is that what it felt like, when you took Berik? 

He says: “I don’t need m-moonlight right now. I was prepared.” 

“You do look pretty set, I guess. What about him?” She jerks a shoulder behind them and it digs into his cheekbone. “Is he getting some moonlight? He looks like he’s about to pass out and swan dive off the wall—breach number two. And then you’d have something to remember Shiganshina by this time, hey?” 

When he gets to Reiner he sees that he’s lying on his back completely inert, not even trying to use the moonlight. His eyes are open and in them the reflection of the moon dances like two coins skittering on some long-ago gambling table in some long-ago mess hall that now in Bertolt’s memory has been carefully excised of any faces but Reiner’s and Annie’s. In some places beyond the wall he has heard they used to place coins there for the passage of the dead to an afterlife. It unsettles him and he pulls Reiner up by his chest harness and slips free the buckles, undoes the belts, opens the buttons of the shirt and eases it over his shoulderblades. “Y-your—” he says, and swallows, and says again: “your—” and Reiner lifts his arms like a child so he can work them free of the sleeves. “Spread them out. I mean—you know.” 

Reiner does, dully. Bertolt reaches over and closes his eyes to expose the few square centimeters of the eyelid to the moonlight, and doesn’t think about how he prefers them closed, right now.  Under the pad of his finger Reiner’s eyeball jumps in acknowledgment of the light pressure, but otherwise he doesn’t react. Bertolt could stroke it, or put it out like a light. He could do any number of things, all of which spin wildly between his temples for a moment, agitating the beating blood, before he backs down, heart in his throat, and pulls his cardigan closer around him, wishing a button had come undone so he could redo it. 

“Your fingers…” he says instead. 

Reiner opens them obediently and in the aftermath of the little flare of savagery Bertolt allows himself the single, acid word: _soldier_. The exposed palms take up the brightness of the moonlight, and immediately the shifter marks begin to ease away. A memory comes to him secondhand—prying Eren’s palms open to expose them to sunlight, holding his head steady to check if the marks were fading—but these were all things Reiner had done, not him; they were quotidian things you did, if you were concerned with your own self-preservation, and Reiner has always done them most devotedly in the service of someone else’s. Bertolt has slept next to this body for five years, lain next to it on the rocks for longer than that, and now he looks at it, soaked in the tingling moonlight, and wonders if he can summon up the color of the skin, or the shade of the hair, or if these too were things like the height of the wall and the memory of faces, things he was, at the time, too young to know were important. 

“You should…k-keep them open,” he says. 

He pulls his knees up to his chest again. Making himself small on the wall, but he doesn’t need to be otherwise to replenish sun—he has always been prepared. He puts his palm down flat on the stone, fingers over the lip of the wall; he thinks he should remember this feeling, too. 

Look at me, he thinks, with sudden fierce heat, but that would necessitate opening Reiner’s eyes. For once Reiner has done what he’s asked of him. He curls and uncurls his fingers on the lip of the wall, and doesn’t push his luck.  

 

 

 

 

 ~

 

 

 

They are growing, the gap under the heavy dormitory doors is clogged with wadded-up towels and balled linen, and Jean Kirschtein is tuning his violin. “Stop _laughing_ ,” he howls, “I messed up because you idiots can’t clap on the damn downbeat, y-you’re all philistines _!_ _Philistines_! and you don’t know how to appreciate music that isn’t—some kind of clangy backdrop for your—your _debauchery_ —“ 

“What does that even mean,” demands Eren, “ _debauchery_ —and I was clapping! I was clapping, didn’t you hear me? Reiner—” Bertolt swivels to look at Eren; it takes him a moment to realize his name wasn’t the one called. “Reiner! What does it mean. Debauchery.”

“See, _I’ll_ tell you, Mister Jaeger, _debauchery,_ that’s,” Connie gestures them in closer, and they all bend in, like a moment in a stage play before bursting into song; Bertolt saw one once at the refugee camps and this too is only a series of set pieces. He leans in halfheartedly. “Debauchery is…what happens in your _pants_ when Annie Leonhardt has her hand down ‘em during hand-to-hand!”

They all fall back, a carousel of tangled-up limbs and whoops and wolf whistles. Even Armin is smiling, the look uneasy as it feels on Bertolt’s own face and the similarity discomfits him so he looks away, at his own hand lying inert on the bedcovers next to Jean’s discarded rosin. Eren is shouting something about whether debauchery means _regulation_ sparring or Leonhardt hand-to-hand technique because they’re EXTREMELY DIFFERENT, YOU CAN’T JUST SMASH THEM TOGETHER, Connie is yelling back gleefully about something else being smashed together. Bertolt’s head hurts. 

The entire room seems dense and small. The four walls around him a geometric foreboding that hems him in with these people. Their flailing arms, the unclean nails at the fingertips and Annie’s and Reiner’s names in their mouths with the rest of the disgusting meat fibers and stale bread caught between their molars, Bertolt’s beings his _people_ only two more indulgences for them to glut themselves on here behind these walls. He looks at the towels jammed under the doorway, blocking out sound; his stomach heaves and he pulls back, away from the knot of boys and their body odor and their unmistakable, unshakeable presence hanging above his bed.

“I—“ he mumbles, “this isn’t—“  the bile rises in his throat and he gets out, knocking over Jean’s violin. His exit is scored to A and D tuned awfully together and that discordance is still ringing in his ears when he stumbles out finally, straightening up to his height under the overturned sky.

“Bertl—wait— _wait_ —“

He startles badly and Reiner catches up to him. In the darkness, his skin glows; he looks like a phantom emerging from the neck of his tunic, pale skin luminous and entirely hallucinatory. “Hey—hey, what, you—did you eat something bad—“

 “I didn’t eat,” says Bertolt, sharp, but at the look in Reiner’s eyes he delays the words, sliding them back and forth over his tongue, finally offering them up helplessly “…something…b-bad.”

“All right,” says Reiner, “well—well, good, then. Sit down. You wanna stay out here for a while?”

“I d-don’t know.”

“Should we go back in, then? It’s not bad, you know. They’re not talking about—that anymore. They’re just talking about their families, that kind of thing.” Bertolt wonders, skin prickling, how Reiner can’t find this _bad_. “Connie has four siblings, I wonder how he feeds them? Or if he’s the one who does? It sounded like he was helping, at least. Must be hard, after the—”

“The fall of Wall M-Maria,” snaps Bertolt. “I-I-I _know_.”

“The drought in south Rose, Bertl,” says Reiner, steely and quiet. His jawline in the open night air, seen from below, is the armored titan’s. “That’s what I was going to say. Sasha told me about it.”

“F-fine. That’s—it’s fine.”

Reiner eyes him contemplatively; possibly narrow-eyed but it’s hard to tell now with the shifting planes of his face. He’s never had an easy face, Reiner. Even when he smiles his brow stays furrowed.

“Tell you what,” he says.

No you won’t, thinks Bertolt. You don’t even know what, these days but the thought stays stalled there as Reiner shoves him aside a little with his hip and scoots into the crevice next to him, under the lit window of the dormitory. There’s no room but he spreads his legs wide, taking up space they don’t have that he compensates for by hesitating, and then, meticulously as threading a needle, snaking his arm under Bertolt’s. “It’s not bad to ask questions, you know. About your family, and things like that. Maybe we should try it.”

“What?”

“What’s your name?”

His arm jerks under Reiner’s fingers. “That’s not funny!” He hears the hysteria in his own voice. “That’s _not_ —“ 

“No! No—not, um, not like that—like a game. What’s your name, Bert—ah, _shit_.” 

“Some g-game if you can’t even do _that_.”

“Well, it’s your name, it’s not like I could _forget_ ,” retorts Reiner, and the polar certainty of this statement more than anything is what compels Bertolt to fidget a little, allowing Reiner an easier grip on his bicep, and try, “It’s Bertolt. Bertolt Hoover.”

“Hi there, Bertolt Hoover. I saw you flinching at Jean’s violin, in there. Don’t you like music?”

The fingers tighten on his arm, anticipatory: Reiner hasn’t forgotten that he likes music. He feels tears pricking at his eyelids so he closes his eyes, and concentrates his entire being on the five points of pressure there, under Reiner’s fingers.

“I do,” Bertolt says. “B-but I—I guess I prefer wind instruments.”

“Hey, me too. My best friend, back home—he taught me and this girl we know how to play on a reed whistle. We used to do it all the time when he wasn’t around, trying to be as good as he was. She was pretty shit at it, though. She doesn’t have an ear for music at _all._ ”

One of them laughs. He’s not sure who. It might be him, and he knocks his head against the flat cedar boards of the dormitory, trying to get the sound out of himself again, not at all sure where it came from. But he wants to hear it again. “I—I’ve got friends like that too. B-back home.”

Reiner hums contentedly. “Sounds like a great place,” he says, “your home. Sounds like you miss—“ he stops; it’s too far— “sounds like you love your friends.”

“Who d-doesn’t?” _Too far_. “I mean—of c-course. Yes.”

Reiner’s laugh is just a staccato puff of breath, very intimate on the exposed skin of his neck. He can feel the heat of his cheek through his tunic, as though all of Reiner is a warm weighted blanket on Bertolt’s limbs, teasing the drowsiness out, giving it form. “Tell me more about it,” he says.

So Bertolt tells him, as if it’s the first time they’ve met, here in the dormitories with all the other boys Reiner asks these questions to, the subject of a gaze he’s never had when it comes to Reiner. A different way to be looked at. He tells him about ice on the great lake where Annie had shifted for the first time, seeing in the reflective plane that adult woman’s reflection that wasn’t hers and going very still, that frost-inflected stillness she’d sheathed her energy in all the way into the training grounds. He tells him about his mother in her studio with watercolors strewn around her, the colors in her canvas so soft and unsaturated it’d taken him a moment to recognize the grotesque skull in the gentle mauves and ivories: _see, little one,_ her light voice, _whatever happens there, how you look to people who love you_. He tells him about chore days cleaning the warning bells on the old roof, gone green with copper oxide, their bronze concavities full of bird shit and pine needles that had taken hours to dig out. He tells him about learning to photosynthesize sunlight: spread out on the rock, fingers and shoulders and calves sometimes touching, the pulse and the sustenance jumping from one of them to the other.

Reiner doesn’t kiss him until he is midway through and then it’s so hopeless and unselfconscious Bertolt knows he shouldn’t acknowledge it at all when he feels it on his cheekbone. A somnambulist kiss. He keeps talking anyway, keeping his own voice aloft. Reiner does it again, and again, as though he’s the one dispensing comfort. Eventually he goes to sleep; Bertolt is there with his shoulder tingling and his arm heavy and dewed with Reiner’s breath, supporting both their weight against the dormitory wall, hands upturned in his lap uselessly seeking a nonexistent light source.

What’s your name, he didn’t get his turn to ask Reiner. What is it like, the place where we came from, seen through your eyes? How can I know that it existed outside my own mind, unless you talk to me?

He thinks about it. Reiner’s cheek on his shoulder has a weight he wouldn’t feel, if he were bearing it in his other body: something he can have only by being fettered by this one.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

It isn’t that sunlight photosynthesis is easier, because it isn’t—exactly the opposite. It’s far more difficult than eating, but this is still something Bertolt has only done once, opening his mouth dutifully for a piece of marzipan his father had made to accustom him to human food in case he needed to eat for cover. It had made him think of being between something else’s jaws and he’d gagged on it; Berik had cupped his hands under his chin for him to spit it out and so his first memory of food is associated with that now, the reflexive way Berik had taken on his discomfort.

There were all kinds of lessons about quickening regeneration, partial and complete shifting, crystallization, which only Annie could do, Annie who inhabited her body with such straight-faced too-fierce-for-smiling delight she couldn’t help but widen her eyes in shuddering wonder as the glitter crept up her arms, and turned them to cold and invincible machinery. They’d been too heavy for her at first, something none of them had anticipated so that she’d fallen over when she’d tried it too quickly and Reiner had scored a point on her for the first time. “Shoulda built a little muscle, Annie,” flicking a fingernail on one of her gauntleted forearms. Bertolt would have done it too if he’d had the nerve: the chime was beautiful, and seemed like it could only come from something limpid and blue, like a glacier, or in later years Armin Arlelt’s oceans, which were nowhere as wondrous and would never be. Bertolt had thought about telling him, many times. “How’re you gonna lift them when they’re _bigger_ , huh?”

“Why should I tell _you_?” Annie had said. “Then you’ll be able to do it too.” 

“That’s the p-point,” blurted Bertolt. Annie flinched and Reiner’s nail on the crystal screeched and stilled. “If one of us l-learns it, you—it b-belongs to everybody.”

She’d studied him then, considered him like something she might unhinge her jaw and swallow whole and then spit back up like the cloying marzipan he still gagged on. There was a panicked, vengeful heat in her gaze that defied anything he’d seen in their mountain village. It wasn’t like a glacier at all. Turning the memory over now it’s overlaid with the probably retroactive recollection of Eren’s wide, wild eyes as the colossal titan breached the wall; that had never been the first time someone had looked at him with fear. 

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

“So, about Brave Lion Heart—“ says Ymir.

Reiner flinches. Bertolt casts his eyes down; he knows you don’t flinch unless you’ve been startled.

He can’t startle anymore, a stance not of disillusionment but of simple intellectual reality: to startle he’d have had to stop thinking about it.

“Sensitive subject,” says Ymir, “okay, I get it. I won’t ask if you want to go back, or anything. It’s not as existentially weakening, or whatever, as you think it is, take it from me if you won’t take it from anyone else. I don’t even like either of you and you _lurve_ Annie, don’t you? Childhood kiddie _buddies_?”

“She’s our, um, partner,” says Bertolt. “She’s our—“

“Ours,” says Reiner. 

“So you do want to go back?” Her shoulders are the most expressive part of her, her disdain a calligraphic movement tipped by moonlight in the dark. The dancing titan, thinks Bertolt. Sixty-years-earned grace. “Well, look at that, I said I wouldn’t ask, and now you’ve _made_ me ask. This is what happens when you don’t say what you mean, I keep _telling_ he—telling everyone.”

Reiner is opening and closing his hands like a book. “We said you could go. You don’t—we’re not detaining you.”

“We d-didn’t say that,” says Bertolt.

“Ah,” says Ymir,” someone saying what he means. That’s nice coming from you. What do you want me to do, Bertolt?”

If Reiner looks at him—if he looks—

It’s a long way down from the wall to the ground. If they’d caught Annie on a wall, it must have meant she was trying to scale it, in which case she must have been taken in by 3DMG users, and would have been able to see their eyes when they took her. Maybe it frightened her enough that she didn’t crystallize herself in time, and that was all she needed for them to be on her.

In Shiganshina, here, he remembers seeing a stockworks before the town was destroyed. He thinks of Annie’s throat enclosed in the wooden circle, the human fingers on her neck pressing their small grubby lifelines and terrifying heartlines into the skin at her nape, over the beaded vertebrae. Her desire to bat them away itching in phantom fingers waiting to grow back. The spattered blood onto her spitshined boots the way the moonlight drips down his neck now. He realizes with a detached, precise horror that he doesn’t know whether he’s imagining Annie or himself.

He looks at Reiner, whose face is drawn and so mirrors the expression his mind’s eye Annie wears that he knows for once in so long—for once they’re thinking the same thing.  

Now you know, he wants to say. Now if I describe it to you you’ll listen, and I told you—I always told you what would happen to us. I knew. _I_ knew and the feeling of self-efficacy shores up in his chest dim and tender but burning, roiling in his blood with all the weight and texture of a foreign substance, almost like, he’d once thought, his ability to love.

He will make a decision tonight, he realizes. There is no more telling to be done. The feeling inside him spreads under his chest like a terrible white sail, aloft on the untempered moonlight, and he feels himself beginning to move.

“I thanked y-you, Ymir,” is what he says.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

They are tucked into their bedrolls in a tent with sixteen other children. They are at the age where some of the garrison members will argue over whether to turn a blind eye to Annie burrowing down behind Bertolt’s back, too proud to ask for her own blanket, or send her to the women’s tent at the expense of Keeping The Remains of a Family Intact. The sole time anyone manages to catch her trying to get to the women’s tent on her own she screams as if she’s being dismembered. 

“I’m just a _frail_ little _girl_!” she sobs. “You can’t _leave me here with all these men!_ My brothers can’t protect me,I’m _scared_ of the colossal _titan_!”

“It’s n-not funny…” Bertolt tells her, as she wipes the false tears methodically from her cheeks. He thinks she could at least use the clean moisture, no small luxury, to get the dirt off her face. The firelight flings her huge, monstrous shadow onto the sheepskin wall of the tent; he looks at it and feels vindicated.

“I would rather be in the women’s tent alone with _them_ than with either of _you_.” She tilts her head blandly and lets her jaw go a little slack, a cruel and exact approximation of the expression he’d worn upon entering the camp, trying to mimic the other shell-shocked children. “After all, who do I have a better chance of dying by sticking close to, d’you think.”

“You’re out of line!” whispers Reiner furiously _,_ “Annie, that’s—”

“True. It’s _true._  You saw the people—you saw the dead people—you’re lying if you say you don’t, you’re—liars. I don’t want to be _near you_! _”_

“I’m going to make sure you’re safe, Annie…I’m going to make sure you’re _both_ safe, you don’t have to be scared of us— “

“I’m not scared of you, I hate you,” she snaps, “I _hate_ you. You can’t even look at what we’re doing—you can’t even be honest about what—“ Her breath hitches and she puts her head down between her knees, going so eerily quiet he knows she couldn’t have wanted to win her own argument.

“I’m going to make sure you’re safe,” Reiner repeats, bewildered, as though she didn’t hear him the first time.

Don’t say it, Annie, thinks Bertolt, _don’t_ , but from her muffled mouth he hears “—like you did for Berik—“ anyway. Reiner’s shoulders do a startled jerk.

Bertolt waits until he’s sure she isn’t going to speak anymore and then begins to lay out his bedroll. He lines up the crease of the blanket perpendicular to the folded towels he is using as a pillow, and puts Reiner’s blanket next to his own because Reiner is still frozen and staring at Annie, helplessly immobile as if in the face of a great, rushing light.

That night is the first time Annie takes up a habit she won’t discard for years: sleeping in a sitting position, back propped against the tentpole, lolling head on its flowerstem neck always turned towards himself and Reiner. The quiet leaks out from her like water from a melting thing and he pulls back to avoid it, flush against Reiner’s back. None of it is comfortable but they can balance themselves like that until morning.

It begins to rain outside, battering the tent walls in intermittent bullet fire. He doesn’t know if any of them sleep. 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

Reiner didn’t love things in the way that Bertolt did, and to this day it’s not clear whether Berik had been the point of divergence or the engineer of it, because he couldn’t have helped but serve as the first thing either of them had loved. He had a storyteller’s understanding of the mission, heavily pigmented and striated moralities, and a storyteller’s kinetic, expressive hands that looked well-suited to the task of leadership, or of anything. Chainlike hands with linked, smoothened joints.

 _It’s just that we’re so soft,_ Reiner had said once at the riverbank. Berik’s light laugh threaded between his words, now indistinguishable from what had been said so those early days always have the tenor of mirth. _I wish we had something with us, a castle maybe. A wall._

Berik had said, _You get to take whatever you become._

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

Annie doesn’t speak to them for six days. On a harvest festival day they watch her in a threadbare secondhand dress, kicking a can back and forth with two children none of them know in the mass of other refugees. The crowd shirrs and shifts like lakewater and it jostles Bertolt forward with the same tidal insistence. Everyone is looking ahead at the burning totem poles; someone presses an empty bottle into his hand and he feels like part of something for the first time, because he has never seen so many children of his age in his life. The wash of bodies, the small hands and jangling jostling excitement, Reiner’s voice in his ear stuttering about maybe a game, or some new type of food—the firelight on his exposed skin sending shudders of apprehension down the hair on his forearms. The effigies on the totem poles are strung up with dead leaves and unidentifiable bits of rubble and the crowd roars in one entity when the trash sparks or combusts. Reiner’s hair is bottlebrush stiff and Bertolt presses his cheek against it as he leans over to listen to something in his ear, some further invitation, and then he sees the tendons.

In an effort to leave before either of them sees he presses back against the bodies with sudden violence. The empty bottle shifts and cracks in his fingers and he lets it drop onto his feet along with the strings of blood when he opens his hand; he thinks numbly that if the injury had happened a moment later—when he’d fully realized what they’re burning—it might have—

“They’re made of corn husks,” tumbles out of his mouth in a rush. “Reiner—they m-made the tendons out of corn husks, look a-at the—“

“What are you talking about—“ They’re at the front of the line now. Reiner’s mouth falls open as he sees, but whatever he was going to say is drowned in the roar as the front line onlookers hefts their empty bottles and stones and fling them into the blazing pitch strung around the effigy’s waist in barrels, smeared up to its throat under the corn-husk tendons that approximate, so crudely, the shape of Bertolt’s adult jawline.

His mother’s voice in his ear, intimate as a scent. _Here is how you look to people who love you, little one._

His teeth are chattering in terror. When he looks around himself, so close to the ground, he sees nothing but eyes gone flat black with anguish and firelight, he half expected the eyes of insects but not sheened over with tears like this, open mouths, spittle flying as people hurl epithets with their debris. A keening comes from the effigy as one straw arm detaches itself and the crowd roars with pulsating joy. He has been sixty meters tall, held high above their city but now he feels himself buffeted by the currents of humanity, flesh on his own beating flesh like a brand and a reminder. The energy of the crowd roils and folds in upon itself to enclose him deeper, muscle and tendon on bone, the mortification of the flesh that preludes shifting: for the first time in his life he understands what it means to be devoured alive by something that will not spare you—something incapable of listening to your justifications.

“ _Reiner_!” he whimpers, “ _Reiner_ —“ but it’s Annie who grabs him by the upper arm, sponging the blood on his hand into her skirt, a ring of horrorstruck red around the edges of her eyes gone neon in the firelight as she mutters “Throw your bottle, Bertolt—”

“They m-made them out of corn husks,” he screams, “they s-saw them—they s-saw that m-much—“    

“ _Throw it_ —“ 

An arm around his shoulder. A hand in his, easing the bloodied hunk of glass free; it winks in the flames as Reiner throws it, and then there is a burst of cold on his cheek as Reiner and Annie drag him from the front line of the crowd, away from the terrible heat and the sight of his own body crumbling before the seething mass of humans laying it to joyous waste. A boom goes up as they hit the alleyway: some larger part of the effigy detaching itself. It won’t regenerate, he thinks giddily under a veil of nausea. He imagines himself strung up on the pyre, if he would be made to wear the corn husks of if they’d be able to see them in his own bone structure. He laughs. His bleeding hands hiss and knit together as he snatches them back from Annie. He puts them on his face, covering it, obscuring it completely with his own blood; he shakes and laughs. _How you look to people who love you_.

“I d-deserved it,” he says. “That’s—I d-deserved—Annie, you—you w-were right—“

“Shut up, Bertolt. That’s not what I meant.”

She looks like her father, defeated by nothing more than age or the fact of time passing. She scrubs at her eye with the heel of one palm.

“Sorry,” she says. The first of many. Annie’s honesty bubbles to the surface like blood when she is hurt. “I’m sorry.”  

And Reiner says, “You don’t deserve it.”

In all the rest of his life to come he will remember Reiner’s face ringed by the terrible red light of the fires, embers striking in the sky beyond them as Reiner kneels down and takes him in his arms. As he sobs out his horror into his shoulder he thinks of Berik cupping his hands under his mouth for the marzipan that had choked him, his mother’s furrowed brow over her watercolors, diluting the angry red of the colossal titan’s browbone to something easier on the eyes, the snow in the mountain village that had always been immense in its softness. He clutches at Reiner’s clothes, which smell of soap chips and smoke, he thinks of home with a festival solemnity, as though ringing a great and hanging bell. Annie wasn’t wrong; she will always be the most honest of them, but in the years to come he will remember that the first lie Reiner told was for his sake, and that was its own type of steadfastness.  

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

He’s patrolling the lower quadrant of the gateside wall when he sees a flash like a flipped coin on the edge and slings his gear loose. When he reels himself in he sees that the grapple landed inches from Reiner’s temple.

 _You could have died,_ he would have cried, a day ago, with Eren bound to him and his heartbeat battering that imminent death back into his own shoulderblades. Now he only wraps a hand around the anchor shaft, steadying himself, and knows his aim is true enough that he wouldn’t have hit him.

“You were—“

“Leaving,” says Reiner, “yeah. Go ahead, you can say it.”

“Could you?” asks Bertolt quietly. “At—when you went with Connie.”

It would be easier if he were the type to get angry, but Reiner has always taken blame where blame is due, and Bertolt has always been good at laying it. His aim is true enough. Reiner’s hands slouch to his hip belts as though shoving hands in his pockets. Their bodies move softly in the wind up here, held aloft by the wires, and as they twist it’s impossible to tell whether they’re facing one another or not. Up in the dark, above them, their lines glitter like long skeins of water.

“I can’t stand this,” Reiner says. “She’s alone. I left her to them. I _left_ her. I deserve—”

 _We,_ Bertolt should say. Or: _None of this is your fault, I let Eren go._

Or: _there’s still time to recoup our losses—we can go. Together._

Or: _Please don’t punish yourself._

His hand slips over the trigger of his own grapple, stippled with dents where the human soldier failed to maintain it properly. The metal is freezing: his saliva must have cauterized the paint away.

I earned this, he realizes. I got this for us, because I did what had to be done.

The dreadful glittering feeling seethes through him all of a sudden, so strongly and with such presence he thinks he could call back his grapple, right now, and put his feet out and walk unaided over the open air. I did this! he could shout. _I did this_! but he moves back, steadying himself against the wall with the heels of his boots, and puts both his hands on Reiner’s cheeks instead, unshaking.

“You d-don’t deserve it,” he says.   

Reiner’s head snaps up in remembrance and his eyes are—in the forest Annie’s scream had knocked birds out of trees and sent leaves skittering in premature autumn, forcing everything outward as though her desperation had taken up physical space in the world, and this is how Reiner’s eyes look now, drinking Bertolt in as though he’s the moon. Oh, thinks Bertolt, oh, is this is how I looked to you, through all the years of our childhood?

With the added years grafted onto it the statement can’t stand like that anymore: he needs to add to it exactly what it is Reiner doesn’t deserve: what’s happening to Annie right now, leagues away, or what they’re headed towards, the miracle of home. Denuded like that it sounds like an admonition. Nothing like the way it sounded to him breathed into his neck as Reiner held him close at that long-ago festival in the camps, but then, they’re not the same people, and it is not, after all, his fault. He understands only now, in the aftermath of giving Reiner back his reassurance, that he would have done anything for Reiner then, and that now he—it’s different.

Reiner’s lips have so much moonlight on them, in the crevices and hollows, that Bertolt barely realizes they aren’t moving at all. He tongues the divot above them carefully, taking the little nourishment in, and then he remembers the proper kiss. He remembers, also, that he should like it, and then he does. Slowly.

 _I would rather be alone than with either of you_ , says Annie, leagues away, her voice either a memory or a palely burning light in the back of his mind.

“Reiner,” he says, voice brimming and deliberate. Annie’s scream had been deliberate, too, but that hadn’t lessened the sincerity of its feeling. “Reiner, you still protected m-me.”

  

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

His body had started seeking Reiner’s well into the three years, after the rest of him had largely stopped. He closed his two and a half handspans within the first two years and by the third was knocking his forehead on the lintels of the dining hall when he went in, stretching his legs into the aisle during lectures, taking out the hems on his tunics by hand and eventually doing away with the sashes altogether so they were just loose shirts, like a child’s, and like a child he was reluctant to take them off but undressed under his blankets in the security of the dormitory and folded the shirts on his pillow when his nightclothes were securely on. The nights were too cold to sleep in skins and without any access to moonlight his body contorted itself, trying to find a source of warmth that approximated sunlight; he’d wake up then wrapped around Reiner’s frowning, still form, and bolt back in embarrassment when the light actually came in, and reminded him of the real thing.

It was impossible of course but not difficult to believe that this was actually how the secret morse longings and romances began, in the boys’ dorms, communicative touches in experimental dots and dashes: matchstick fingertips, hands become kindling. Eren and Armin slept folded together like two halves of a book and Marco was often solicitous of Jean’s blankets. Out on the training grounds Annie had a way of taking her shirt off, rolling her shoulders uncaring under the sudden heat of flushed, curious gazes; she’d bend her head down exposing her nape to the cloud-stippled sky and he knew she too was lusting for sunlight. He grew, in longing and stature, and in the dormitory he and Reiner always began the night with a gap of still air between them, close as two shoulders, in tandem and ever present in support but unable to touch. Sleep freed them.

To begin the morning hip to hip, chest flush against Reiner’s abdomen, his shoulders worked under his own, and then go back to that touchless, detached space was something that defied categorization. Their bunkmates teased him about the weather and like the weather this too was fact, his own body something to be moved through and protected against. It was fine. Fine. He could treat his own body as an enemy as well as anyone else could—had. It made him feel dirty and hotly vindicated, as he imagined it would to touch himself. You lost your fastidiousness here, in human territory. That was why it was important to be careful of all your myriad appetites.

“You should eat,” Reiner would say, “if you’re hungry.”

“If you collapse of exhaustion on a _technicality_ , because you didn’t want to eat human food—” said Annie, and then capsized her irritable expression, looking glossily bored again. “Well, do what you’d like. Your growing pains are hopelessly uninteresting, and what’s more they’re embarrassing to my feminine sensibilities.”

“Only if you’re hungry,” said Reiner. “Just because we’re here doesn’t mean—you should take what you want.”

Reiner’s wants had always been easy and numerous and bright enough to constellate a pattern to his days, shape and form given to Reiner Braun’s time behind the walls by the younger boys who crowded around him, marveling over the homework he strained over for them more carefully than for his grade. Or by Christa Lenz, with whom he traded his smiles like exact change, both of them seeking recognition for that brittle similarity in their own natures. By Eren Jaeger, who poured his longing over everything more exuberantly than Reiner did, who talked in his high wild voice about putting a blade through Bertolt’s throat, though he couldn’t have—he _couldn’t have_ known it was Bertolt, and Reiner laughed his gunshot laugh, always, and had never met Bertolt’s eyes as he fit his fingers to those outstretched  hands, and corrected the grip that would kill him.  

They did have three years for Bertolt to think about what it was that he wanted. He didn’t know what satisfaction he could have derived from the things his eyes sought, the pearly curve at Annie’s jawline that demanded the attention of a cartographer, unknown as it was to him (when had she come to look like that—nearly happy?) or the band of skin under Reiner’s waistband when it slipped down in sleep, which was soft and heated with a few secret pulses that had been there when they were children on the flat rocks.

In Reiner’s eyes in the mornings he was locked inside the irises forever unthreatening, nothing to be looked at with fear. That was the closeness he wanted, a corporeal loyalty Reiner’s body at the very least could confirm wordlessly, without deception, if nothing else of his would.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

He hadn’t been surprised when Armin said what he did about Annie, and so his reaction even now fails to make sense to him. There was no logic about the rage he had felt but only a vindication— _he_ knew, he _knew_ —so he’d drawn his blade and flung his fury outward refusing to make himself small the way Reiner had always told him to do on the rocks as children. Opened like a wing out there he’d felt purified to his core, his spine become a hot waxy candle wick and the purpose within him gone bright, sparkling blue over the years: this was what he was born to do, and there was within him a satisfaction that he had never strayed.

Bertolt understands of Eren better than Reiner or Annie probably ever could that you earn your right to anger. If you forfeit it, as they’d done, you no longer can face the things that happen to you as misfortunes, only as mistakes. He told them and told them. You _lost your fastidiousness_.

But he never lost his, and so he has earned for as many of them as possible the right to go home.

Up on the top of the wall he can see Ymir’s sleeping form a few meters away. He reels himself in at one of the old abandoned stationary guard towers with old boards gone grey and silver now with disuse. Reiner pulls himself in a moment later and touches his mouth, drawing a thumb across it as though trying to recapture whatever reassurance he used to have, to be able to cover it with his own so blindly. “It’s still m-me,” says Bertolt in encouragement, and then Reiner makes a small, wrecked noise in his throat and bends in to him. The gate of the security tower clacks behind them on its rusted hinges. Not yet, thinks Bertolt, not _yet—_

“You’ll go back with me to get her,” says Reiner, hot and desperate against his neck. His hands twisting and untwisting Bertolt’s chest harness. “Won’t you? So we can all be together—so it won’t happen again—“

Annie made her forfeit when she went on her hunt alone, when she made her gamble in Stohess but she was wrong, and Reiner was wrong too, because Bertolt saw his face when Armin shouted to them, and it was full of self-loathing, not the anger he knows is the only gravity that can pull them back home. Even now, he thinks, and his fingers tighten up in Reiner’s hair—even _now_ Reiner tries to survive using the wrong thing.

 “I’ll—d-decide,” he says. “I have—I have the r-right,” and Reiner pulls away from him as though his entire body has come alight and he can feel the firebrand through his skin, too hot to touch, searing away the impurities Bertolt now understands have come to keep him alive.

 

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

There’s nowhere to hide in the showers. He’s too tall and his head and shoulders rise above the curtains so that he’s sure everyone is looking at him when he rinses the soap from his eyes and they sting with tears. The steam from the shower shrouds the antiseptic vapor when he doesn’t get it out in time, but Reiner always catches the scent and smiles uneasily at him from the cubicle over when he can.

“Bertolt,” Eren is hollering, “Bertolt, can I practice with you tomorrow? We have the day off, maybe if you’re not busy…! I mean, if you want to—”

Eren’s head bobs and weaves merrily under the stream of water in the stall next to his. “Why me?”

“You’re so _tall_! If I can get _you_ , I can get anyone—I mean, Annie says it’s not even really about hand-to-hand at that point, it’s just how good you are at intimidating, you know. ‘Unstoppable forces of nature,’ quote unquote.”

The thin lemon slime that passes as soap makes his fingers slip. He jabs his own eyes and whimpers as the vapor cauterizes the pain out. “ _I’m_ not an—w-who said I was a—“

“Your height,” says Reiner. “You’re tall. That’s all, Bertl.”

His eyes won’t stop stinging and stinging. “I’m not a—don’t call me a—“

The curtain bangs open and Eren is suddenly terrifyingly close, too close. Someone whistles and someone else catcalls “Slow _down_ , Jaeger” but Eren doesn’t pay attention at all, only skids across the tiles setting his feet heavily, anchoring himself so he doesn’t slip in the sudsy water as he elbows Bertolt in the stomach, seizes him by the back of his hair and twists his body down into a collapsed s-shape against the wall of the stall. The switch for hot water snaps off as Bertolt’s shoulder hits the water tank and the shower screams and screams. The old terror of the camp swallows him up: the effigy and the hatred in those hundreds of eyes. It’s all blank shorted-out lemon-stinging white noise for a moment before he thinks to set his forearm the way he used to as a child, for Annie’s offensive charges, and sweep it out to his full reach, slamming Eren hard in the solar plexus so he’s thrown bodily out of the shower.

“Eren!” Armin is screaming, amid the laughter, “Eren, you could have _killed_ someone—you could have killed _yourself_ —“

“I d-d-didn’t—“ Bertolt doesn’t know who he’s talking to. “He _attacked_ m-me—y-y-you saw! You all s-saw—“

“It wouldn’t have done anything, my technique’s still sloppy! But did you _see_ that? I told you, Bertolt’s really something! It’ll be so much _fun_ to practice with you, please say you will, Bertolt, please, please—“

“I don’t want to p-practice with you!”

“Bertolt, hey—“

He throws the curtain closed and sinks to the floor under the cold stream of water, shaking. From the other side of the opposite curtain he can hear Reiner breathing heavily.

The water batters the back of his neck. There’s nowhere to go. Under his grip Eren’s body was wet and unmanageable as a seal’s but it hadn’t been the spindly one that had flipped upright in his harness on the first day of training. There had been muscle there, the curvature of an adult self. A body to match those awful eyes. A body that could carry a mind’s finely honed purpose like Annie’s elegant hands knocking apart those knees to correct a stance, Reiner’s supporting those straightening shoulders. His enemies are growing into their own assisted by— _assisted_ by _—_

He winds his naked limbs in closer to himself. With his head and shoulders no longer showing above the curtain of the shower his presence has been forgotten. Reiner’s body behind the curtain is perfectly still, but the dented shadow of his head is turned away from Bertolt. It nearly doesn’t hurt him anymore, and the sense of loss is the greater for that: that once, he would have been surprised.

 

 

 

 

~

  

 

 

As a child once he’d fallen asleep on the flat rock and when he’d woken up there was an exceptionally large mantis on his shoulder, drawing its hairlike antennae across his eyebrow. He’d screamed and batted it away but even after Reiner had scrubbed the skin there with river water and kisses he’d still shuddered at the sensation of its crawling. He can’t remember anymore whether he’d known he’d need to stay awake and vigilant to avoid any more that night, or whether he’d slept fitfully, and dreamed of hundreds of phantom feet skittering up his limbs, pricking their way to his neck, where he would never be cut out but only gently, lovingly bitten to death.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

“You were looking at me,” says Annie. “All evening. While I was fighting, and—after that.”

She placed third in hand-to-hand. She’s lucky it doesn’t count, and he doesn’t say anything to her. She swills her glass of beer in concentric circles, as human in her tastes as any of them. In the low lantern light things that he knows are yellow are all gold, the gold in her glass a cupped portion of the gold spilled over the long low tables pushed together, drawing the eye from indulgence to indulgence, smooth honeyed cedar of the boards, her upswept hair. In the barracks they call her an ice queen, and he thinks: ice is multifaceted, many-colored, quick to yield to a tongue touching it but he knows no one means it that way.

“If you want to ask for something—” she says.

“No, I—I would never ask you for a-anything.”

“Right, careless of me to forget,” she says, and takes a small, medicinal sip of her beer. Your body isn’t built for it, he thinks, suddenly sharp with spite. You can want it as much as you like, but your own body—your own body you trust more than you have ever trusted us, it won’t let you have it. “So austere, aren’t you, Bertolt? So pure.” Fingertip on the lip of her glass, like peering over a wall. “Someone like me couldn’t hope to understand what you want from me, anyway.”

“I—“

“I’m  not very austere.” Her glance is wide and guileless, too guileless, the irises round as the lake out back of the training compounds. “But you know that too, don’t you. Since you were watching.”

“You know w-why I have to.”

“Not for much longer, anyway.”

“You can’t d-decide that.”

Eren lets out a litany of shouted words across the room and Annie hears her name in it somehow, and tosses him an offhand wave. The proud teacher, preening in the reflected light of her student. “Can’t I?”

“We decided—“

“It’s graduation night, Bertolt. I’m number _four_ ,” she holds up the four fingers one by one, letting him see her moonlike palm, “you know _exactly_ where I stand now.”

“Three and f-four.”

“And two,” she says. “But you don’t necessarily know where all of those numbers are in an order, do you?”

“I don’t know what you’re t-talking about.”

The easy bravado goes out of her stance; she goes limp against the table, and he can see the exhaustion of every week of the last three years. In his chest he feels the absence of the old desire that used to occupy the space there: to support her as he supports Reiner, the way he used to wish to be like the wooden grain of the table that now pushes back against her body, keeping her upright.

“Do you remember when we saw the effigy of—“

It's the first time she's alluded to a shared memory. “Yes.” 

“Of course. Of course you do.”

The years between them billow up, break, recede across dangerous ground stippled with broken glass and sand. An ocean has rushed into the empty spaces. They are so distant from one another now that there are no sharp edges left. Like weighted water the submarinean years have worn hers down, and she no longer has the power to hurt him she did once, a little girl in a tent snarling at him that he was a liar. Neither of them have seen any more of the sea than these landmoored, caged people, but they have been sailors nonetheless, and in the lay of the land and the way the rain falls here they’ve learned to navigate. They both know where the lies are, and what is true, and this girl will not lie for his sake or for her own any longer.

A weariness hits him. Total as a wall. He thinks, vaguely astonished, that he should feel something more, looking at this half of the home that he has used as a lodestar for what feels like his entire life now, aware that he will never pull her out of her own nape again knowing it’s the correct decision for all three of them.

Annie takes a large gulp of her drink and fights it down instead of following her gag reflex. On the way out the unnameable thing he wants from her, the knowledge she’s taken, burns in his throat the same way so he thinks he can feel it all the way down his sternum, a fractaling liquid heat, too much too close too headily and nothing like the nurturing sun. When he sees Reiner as he glances up it’s an alleviation, gentle and effortless; he thinks of magnets, interlocking hipbones, the blissful hitch and give in his skin as his nape is cut apart to draw him out, Reiner’s neck and the pale line of it in the night an upright mark in the small tally of indulgences that has always been his birthright.

“Reiner,” he says.

Reiner sees him, and hums in his throat so Bertolt knows he must have been thinking of him. He sets his mug down on the edge of the dirt path, between the toes of his boots.

“Wow—“ he says, “are you—are _you_ drunk?”

“Why?”

“That’s not…how you usually say my name, is it?”

“How did I say it.”

“Well, you’d be surprised, Bertl.”

“Don’t c-call me that.”

“What?”

“Like—“ he thinks of the motion of Annie’s neck, swallowing her liquor and her defiance; he feels the hard knot of it in his own throat.

Here he is then, tonight, and Annie was halfway wrong: something, someone still belongs to him. He knows, and has always known, where this boy stands.

“Like a game.”

“A game—” Reiner’s arms are crossed and his fingers stutter along the line of his bicep, but then they stop, and he smiles. There’s a nasty, swooping sort of delight in Bertolt’s stomach as he gets closer, thinking about kicking in the wall and about the brittleness in his chest spreading open along the hairline fractures and then about nothing as his foot hits the handle of Reiner’s mug, forcing it into the instep of Reiner’s own boot.

“All right. All right, _Bertolt_. If that’s what you want.”

The jutting sill of the dormitory window they sat beneath three years ago digs into his hipbone when they fall back hard against it. This is nothing like the night’s somnambulist entanglings; it’s a utilitarian kiss, a pragmatic kind of kiss that busies itself with logistics, leverage, Reiner’s large hands on him positioning him systematically as a piece of artillery to skew Bertolt’s body to a height that lets him get his tongue in his mouth. Bertolt makes a sound that must sound like—what he wants it to do, because the tongue is retracted, and then it’s just soft lips, the same ones that haven’t said anything he can trust in years, but he kisses back that lying, longing mouth as though he can tip his admonitions into it. He keeps his eyes open and twines his fingers in Reiner’s hair, raking it up straight. Vertically, faced with the necessity of consciousness, it’s all different. Adult. Undercut by volition, the efforts and strainings of their bodies charged with presence, their motion, again and again, reinforcing the act of choosing to do what they’re doing now, working themselves back into the setpieces of their second childhood as Reiner shucks his pants off over his hipbones, over his thighs.

The night wind raises goosebumps on his calves. He looks over his shoulder at the exposed skin and Reiner mistakes it for enthusiasm, mouths an encouragement into the join between his pelvis and his hip, where the skin is tissuelike and vulnerable. Bertolt shudders at the sensation. The swooping feeling turns over in his stomach and he feels light and nauseous with vertigo like the first time he’d shifted: the suddenness of the height and the moment before he’d known whether or not to find it pleasurable. Reiner’s mouth on him is wet and soft as a fruit, all tongue and lips, a gentle suckling on the jut of his hipbone, open-mouthed kisses all along on the v-notches where his navel slopes into his groin. He gasps out loud and Reiner chuckles and says _Bertolt_ into the marked, distressed skin, the foreign, full name. Someone he never grew up with or allowed the intimacy of a nickname, but would allow—this.

His breath catches and he straightens his legs. Reiner frowns and lifts him bodily, hooking his thighs up over those deceptively capable shoulders. His hands flatten and close on Bertolt’s hips as though it’s the first time he’s touched him, and this is what sticks in Bertolt’s throat when Reiner takes his cock in his mouth. He’s eager and lewd and doesn’t look up at Bertolt at all, squeezing his ass, cupping his balls and sending jolts of shocked, scandalized excitement up Bertolt’s spine so sharply all of him convulses, knocking his head hard against the wood of the dormitory.

He thinks wildly that he should be feeling satisfied, the center of this kind of focus, but there’s a knifelike edge to the trembling, billowing feeling in his stomach as Reiner sucks on the tip of his cock. He only feels hungrier. “Look—“ he gasps, “look at—“

Reiner pulls back, laughing. His chin is wet and Bertolt feels a little ill looking at it—that _this_ is what Reiner would rather do than talk, this—thing, with _Bertolt_. Someone he doesn’t know, and someone _Bertl_ , on the flat rock of their childhood with his heart in his mouth, couldn’t have known either. “I’m looking. Trust me, I can see everything from here.“

It slips out. “You do see b-better at night.”

The grin falls off Reiner’s face so easily Bertolt can’t ensure it was there in the first place. “What’s that supposed to mean.”

In his entire life, Bertolt has never felt so sickened at anything as his relief when Reiner takes his hands off his hips and gets up, brushing the dirt off his knees. He buttons his pants quickly and with shaking fingers. The moment didn’t have to be lost, he thinks frantically, and then that it wasn’t the interruption that killed it, but what he’s doing now, gathering the loosened pieces of his control back to himself like this, recouping unacceptable losses. “I d-didn’t mean,” he mumbles. “I only want you to look at m-me.”

“Well, I was—I’d say I was fucking looking at you, Bertl. I promised I would, didn’t I?“

Bertolt’s hand slips on his button; he looks at his hand, and his fingertips are still wet with precome, or with Reiner’s saliva. “Of c-course you do,” he says, “you and Eren J-Jaeger—how you can hurt me—Annie was right about h-herself, but I always knew she…I didn’t know _you_ would. I d-didn’t want to believe it.”

“ _Eren Jaeger_ —all right, look, if this is about—“

“Coddling them—grooming them, their bodies w-wouldn’t be able to do _anything_ if you didn’t—“

“ _Teaching_ him to get his act together, just so he can—“

“ _Kill me_!” It comes out like a shriek—he thought he’d whispered. It rings, but he thought he’d whispered. “ _So he can kill me_!”

They freeze bending in towards one another, corralling the statement in the space between their bodies. Hemming it in to beat against a cage. Bertolt is sick with exhilaration: Reiner is looking straight at him.    

“Okay,” says Reiner, and steps back. “All right, I can’t fight you on this anymore, Bertolt. I don’t—if you don’t want to believe me—“

And graduation night means something after all, even as a useless human ritual, because Bertolt is conscious now of his history as he has never been. This is a disengagement, he hears, in the way Annie had sighed, leaning against the table. There was an intimacy in entanglements but this is what it means to graduate, to disconnect yourself without regret, to think attritively. To say what he says now.

“No one else but me will b-believe you,” he says. “B-but it’s easy for you to say. You—“

He must have looked like that, when they saw the effigies: filled with the same rising terror in Reiner’s eyes.

“Don’t say it, Bertl. Don’t—”

“—they wouldn’t—“

“ _Don’t!_ ”

“—they _wouldn’t kill you first_!”

Reiner doesn’t leave him then, he will tell himself in the terrible hour after, crouched under the windowsill shaking and still half-hard, to his own shame. Reiner backs off, with the terror a liquid thing balanced in his eyes like a child afraid of spilling something precious, but it isn’t an act of leaving. This is Reiner whose bottlebrush hair has been a constant on the side of Bertolt’s cheek since they were children, more familiar to him than the texture of his own, who lied to him in the firelight for his own sake and how can Bertolt now blame him, for overextending himself within the safety net of that single beautiful lie, for taking risks in full cognizance of its presence, when Bertolt himself has for so many years.

The night presses down on his ringing eardrums like a sense of height. No more lying, he thinks wildly, as the exposed skin on his hip tingles with starlight. No more lying, little one, for now you are the only one left standing, and he is afraid of you too.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

After Berik died, it’d taken three days for Annie to catch up with them, and she’d run for most of it, something they'd never seen her do again, even in training, even when she was assigned laps for her little indecencies with Eren out on the training grounds—but after Berik’s death, she’d seen the smoke signal and she’d run twenty-nine leagues.

“You weren’t even supposed to get here until the—“

“Yeah, a lot of things weren’t supposed to happen,” she’d said, and spit some blood out of her mouth even as it evaporated. Bertolt, holding her upright in the shifter nape, had watched his tears running down her hair, down her shoulders, back into the body of her greater self. “I’m his replacement. I always knew I was going to do this. We—you shouldn’t have gotten attached.”

She was tensed up in his arms as if he’d taken her between his jaws. When he looked down he saw that she wasn’t trying to wipe his tears off, perhaps because they weren’t his. It was all Reiner had needed. He’d scrambled in close, using the distended vertebrae to claw his way up her neck, huddled in the lee of her open jugular vein and grabbed Bertolt’s wrist, just over Annie’s shoulder.

The stench of blood was thick on them. If they slipped they could be in her yawning, open mouth. They held on to her hair for purchase and there they were: warriors now, lashed with blood and strung up by the sinews of what were now their own decisions, an incomprehensible aftermath. 

“I won’t let it happen again,” Reiner was sobbing. “Nobody is—I don’t care if it wasn’t supposed to happen, it’s not going to. It’s _not_. Don’t let me—I won’t let you—you both, we belong to each other. That’s how it’s going to be.”

“Please let go of me,” said Annie brokenly. The use of the word touched him considering what a rude person she was, but he didn’t think he knew she was talking out loud. “Please. I don’t care if I fall down. I don’t want to belong to _you._ I want to go home. Please.”

“Annie—“ It was important, so important, to make her understand; after a while she stopped shaking and lay limply in his arms. A lock of matted, bloody hair stuck to her eyelids and she let it stay there, horrostruck in her apathy. He found it beautiful. “That’s. That’s why you d-do. It’s what we all w-want.”

There was a southeasterly wind blowing, the same that had been in the air when they’d left. A few stars were smeared and smoldering in a mellow, plum-colored sky. Bertolt remembered being there, covered in blood and tears and burning all over with saline and reassurance. As long as they were scared, they felt the same way he did, and he could understand their desires. He couldn’t have told them that he was happy. If the past meant nothing then it was impossible that the future could.

It was like the sun, all that danger held at remove, the threat of overexposure mitigated by miles of emptiness: you would never know where the limit was, when you’d had too much and lost the distinction between being nourished and being burned alive. All you could do was strain towards the source of warmth.

  

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

He wakes up with an ache in his neck from the floor of the security tower and a odd, peaceful certainty that his decision has been made for him: was always made from the moment he understood on graduation night, and again at Castle Utgard, and again facing Armin Arlelt from between Reiner’s disintegrating fingers, that a compass face is only an accident of function away from a clock’s, and somehow with the winding down of time he has become all that’s left of their magnetic north.

He gets up and stretches finding the cricks in his hands. He finds Reiner, who is crouched on the outside of the tower for his watch, squinting at the sun’s fractaling light in the east.

“We’re not going back,” he says.

Reiner gets to his feet immediately. “You—“

“We’re not,” says Bertolt. “We’re. We’re going home. She w-would want that.”

“She wouldn’t. For god’s sake—for god’s _sake_ , who would _want_ that—“

“You don’t know what she would’ve w-wanted.”

“Neither do you!” shouts Reiner, and it’s out like that, the wounds of the years, the bandages stripped off, the injuries exposed to daybreak and they have hurt themselves so badly by now that what they do to one another is only an afterthought. The worst has already happened. They don’t need each other like children anymore and after all they never spent any time at all trying to understand how to need each other as anything else.  “You—for all your watching, for all your staring at us all the goddamn— “

“She’d be here if she’d l-listened to me,” says Bertolt. “I was a failure at it. I w-was a failure at a lot of things. But I was never a failure as—“

“Bertl!”

“As a warrior.”

“ _Don’t say that_!”

“You n- _never_ let me think it,” shouts Bertolt, “you—you let me follow you, and—and l-lied to me—because you d-didn’t want to think I was the only w-way to be a warrior—you didn’t want to b-be like me—“

“I kept you alive!” And oh—the worst part of this is that this, of everything he has said, is not a lie. “You don’t want to go back now because you’re afraid, but you don’t have to _be_ afraid—if we’re together, we—“

His hands are spread, defenseless in front of him, a pose of sheer entreaty. And Bertolt knows then with a bone-jarring certainty that he has always loved this being in front of him, and failed to realize had been given into his care, but that love had never been any less potent for his delusions, just as his own competence had never been lessened by the veil he’d pulled over it like a bride’s; that love had never been the question, and just as Annie’s love had not saved her or anyone no one will be saved by the starkness of his feelings now, watching Reiner implore him the way he had implored Reiner at Utgard, with his hands outstretched, and all the accumulated sunlight and hope of seventeen years glimmering in the irises of his eyes. He is shaken, to the soles of his feet, by how much he loves Reiner now, and he knows, also, that he will never love him as much again, now that he knows even the feeling at the summit of his love is not enough to keep him from doing what he will do next.

“I should have been afraid _,_ ” he says then. “I was never safe with you,” and incinerates the rest of Reiner as surely as kindling: he was right, to be afraid to stand so close to something so pure.

Reiner crumples immediately. Bertolt has been watching for years now, and knows to step in and gather him in his arms at the moment he begins to weep. His shoulder is soaked through with tears in an instant. Reiner is a better height than he is to hold and he cups his shoulders close to him, sick and shaking with his useless, bitter love, a love steepened and gone sour now. He kisses the arch of his browbone and his cheeks and the corner of his mouth, and Reiner sobs and sobs, now only a child who never saved anyone after all, not Berik, and not Annie, and now, not Bertolt. A part of Bertolt—the part that twinged, when Jean asked him bluntly if he regretted it—surfaces emberlike, and attests that this too is a lie, but the glittering sail has unfurled entirely now, his purpose is pure as a blade; this is a human feeling, and he has vowed to burn it all down.

We belong to each other, he thinks, and then he doesn’t. What he thinks is: I understand now, what it means to take on a person as a responsibility, and that is why I understand what I have taken from you, and why I will still bring you home, even if you did not allow me to bring you both home whole.

Reiner clutches at the back of his shirt. Bertolt lets him cry, and lets his hands walk down the chest harness, across the broad chest he used to lay his head on in sleep, skipping across the hip belt, reacquainting himself with Reiner as the one who has earned the right to touch him, to reassure him, across the jut of his hipbone under the belt, up his back and over his holster, pulling him close enough to draw his blade. Kissing him light as rain on his opened lips, the salt and the tears and the old longing distinguishable and unquenchable still in spite of everything; Reiner kisses back then, for the first time unsteady on his feet, and Bertolt works the rest of the blade gently loose as Reiner gets to his tiptoes to pull him closer, swivels it slowly around in his left hand, and knocks him out with the hilt.

 

  

 

 

~

 

 

 

Something he has never told anyone is that he was earnestly ready to die when Mikasa came at him with her blade and her eyes full of the same panic he felt jumping in his own throat. He hadn’t known he was capable of accepting death but he had been, and it had been too many years behind human territory and the very sunlight had begun to taste of hatred anyway, layered with the weight of his guilt that had become alchemically dangerous, like his love. It was only pain he’d feared—how would anyone decide when he’d had enough? he could never, after all, have enough—but death had a finality and a cathartic closing of accounts for the things he’d done and the smaller wrongs that had been grafted onto the greater ones, the things he had done to Annie, and to Reiner, and most of all to the wretched self that had learned to lie and manipulate and cheat in the service of sustaining itself indefinitely. There was no more need for pretense and Mikasa had always kept her blades so clean.

Reiner hadn’t looked at him when he came in to protect him but it had been the sole time in their lives when he hadn’t needed to. Bertolt had seen the tendons in his back straining under the heat and the pain from his own injury, and he had heard the things that had been Reiner’s death knells as surely as if someone had rung them next to his ear, or spoken them with his own voice.

They were children’s sentiments and they were pathetic as he had become, but as with his own self that was the only way they could have survived. They had been true for him since he was a child on the rock, and only that once in his life he has been glad they were true for Reiner, on the verge of their deaths:

to me, you are an anchor—

(how you look, to people who love you)

—you are still everything.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

  

You get to take what you become, Berik had said.

Annie had tried to become her home, what she wanted of it and of her father that she wanted to remember, and in the end she had become a teacher undone by her own hand as well. Reiner had become his armor, but unlike him Bertolt has grown old enough to wonder if the inverse is also true. Could you become what you take, as well? Now as he binds Reiner to his back, does he receive what he took from him, the mantle of a protector?

“That was cruel,” says Ymir as he finds her, already awake and alert. He gives her the grapples of Reiner’s gear and kneels to help her with the belts.

“I’m t-taking us home,” says Bertolt. 

He thinks of Annie wrapping his bleeding hands in her old dress from the refugee camp, making a fastidious face at the spatters but it had looked like a different expression. She wouldn't have wanted him to remember her by that moment of tenderness, but then, she didn't give him the choice. He thinks he will always think of her that way now.

“No more risks,” says Ymir. “I understand.”

“You’d have d-done the same.”

“I went back,” she reminds him, and he slips the bight of the last buckle into her belt and lets go of her. They hold on to one another perfunctorily to stretch their legs for avoiding motion cramps, and he feels the bone in her forearm, edged and present there, like a blade in his hand, or perhaps everything will feel like that from here on forward.

The road home is burning in his mind’s eye, a silver line in the dark, and his feet, he has always known, will forever know the way.

“He won’t forgive you when he wakes up.”

“I don’t n-need it anymore.”

To be loved—to be seen—he had indulged himself too, he now realizes, and none of these were things that could keep him alive. Reiner’s body is a warm and anchoring weight against his back but it’s all different now: he knows where the steadying force is. Before him the city of Shiganshina lies in an ocean of rubble; the glittering sail under his chest has unfurled completely bearing him onward and forward; he is a warrior now, bereft and stark of everything he had wanted, and how could a vessel move, after all, unless it had lost its anchor?

That day behind the dormitories Reiner had told him he would never forget his name but Bertolt’s memory is blurring already. Was it a promise or an admonition, and had he known then what he knows now? He has hollowed himself out of anything that could receive love and he knows that full well, has abandoned all pretext of wanting anything but that original desire here behind these walls. Some part of him knows quietly that he is a true shadow now, and not the warrior, but it’s the same part that doesn’t understand the loss of Annie and he resigns himself to its aching for the rest of his life. He is nothing now, nothing that can be hurt, but on the rocks as children Reiner is there, telling him again, as often as he needs it, not to make himself small.

Here is how you have always looked, he says, to people who love you, and then he fires his grapple, watching the line disappear beyond the gate, steps off the wall, and puts the last of human territory behind them.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

We parted where the old gas-lamp still burned

Under the wayside maple and walked on

Into the dark, as we had always done;

And I, no doubt, if he had not returned,

Might yet be unaware that he had earned

More than earth gives to many who have won

More than it has to give when they are gone—

As duly and indelibly I learned.

 

- _E.A. Robinson_

 

 

_~_

the end


End file.
